


to live in a house that is haunted

by patrokla



Category: The Libertines
Genre: I KNOW. i know, M/M, ghost au, sexy haunted houses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-05
Updated: 2016-12-05
Packaged: 2018-09-06 16:32:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8760562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/patrokla/pseuds/patrokla
Summary: “That’s what I want for my birthday,” Carl announces. “A sexy haunted house.”





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [princegrantaire](https://archiveofourown.org/users/princegrantaire/gifts).



> This horrible fic exists solely because I woke up to a message from Alissa reading "CARL GOES....TO A SEXY HAUNTED HOUSE" a few weeks ago and the phrase would not leave my head. It's set in the ghost au, or an au of the ghost au, but the important things to note are:  
> \- Peter is a ghost  
> \- Carl can't touch Peter unless he's in a terrible place mentally or physically  
> \- They have a cat named Belvedere (who appears briefly in this fic)  
> \- 'the society' is the Ghost Rights Society, which Peter is nominally a member of  
> \- John is a lonely, lonely ghost
> 
> Title from Leonard Cohen's 'Is This What You Wanted' because I'm terrible. 
> 
> Warning for: brief, non-graphic mention of the sink incident.

“A sexy haunted house!”  
  
Peter almost chokes on air he can't even breathe.  
  
“Y’what?”  
  
“That’s what I want for my birthday,” Carl announces, looking determined. “A sexy haunted house.”  
  
Peter eyes him warily, but if Carl’s taking the piss he’s doing a good job of hiding it.  
  
“What exactly…” Peter starts, but he can’t even think of how to finish his question.  
  
“A sexy haunted house,” Carl says one more time, and then, “Oh shit, I’m late for work!”  
  
—  
  
Peter enlists the help of Wolfman with the matter. Wolfman’s reaction is much like Peter’s, but since he does actually need air, he ends up coughing and choking for over a minute. Peter’s about to try and attract someone’s attention on the street so they can do CPR when Wolfman finally whispers, “A sexy haunted house?”  
  
“Apparently,” Peter replies helplessly.  
  
Part of him wants to forget all about Carl’s request, but another part of him is too fond of Carl to forget it, and a third part is very curious to see what a sexy haunted house might be. He’s dead, but he’s not that dead.  
  
—  
  
“Type faster,” Peter says, wishing once again that he could use a smartphone. It’s the heat-activated sensors on the screen, he can push the buttons on a Blackberry just fine, but Wolfman’s got some kind of iPhone, and when Peter tried to search ‘sexy haunted house london’ he couldn’t even get a browser open.  
  
“I’m typing as fast as I can,” Wolfman says, poking at the ‘x’ key three times and hitting a different letter every time. “These buttons are too small!”  
  
“Your fingers are too big!”  
  
Peter resolves to get himself a Blackberry for his birthday. He deserves it, he really does.  
  
“There we go,” Wolfman finally says, sounding pleased.  
  
“You found something?”  
  
“What? No, but I got it all typed in,” Wolfman says, poking the ‘enter’ key and looking smug.  
  
“Jesus,” Peter sighs, but he goes back to peering over Wolfman’s shoulder as results come up.  
  
“Hmm, Anna Kendrick,” Wolfman says thoughtfully, looking at the first result, and Peter heaves an even greater sigh. For someone who's incorporeal, he’s still got impressive lungs.  
  
“Alright, alright,” Wolfman murmurs, scrolling past Anna Kendrick’s exploits and onto the other pages. “Look, there’s one in-"  
  
“Los Angeles and Philadelphia? That’s it?”  
  
“Apparently,” Wolfman says, and Peter makes a face.  
  
“Well that’s no good,” he says, “I can’t get Carl to America. I don’t think I could even get myself to America. I’ve never tried to get on a plane as a ghost, but-“  
  
“I heard they got those spectral sensors,” Wolfman says, “Mate of mine tried to sneak onto a plane to Thailand and the flight attendants went mental, started throwing salt everywhere.”  
  
“Right, well that’s out, then. What about…I suppose I could convince some of the other ghosts from the society to come ‘round and…I mean I really don’t know what Carl wants from this whole thing.”  
  
“I think it’s fairly obvious,” Wolfman says, but he refuses to elaborate when Peter asks for details.  
  
—  
  
Peter hasn’t had to try and look innocent since before he died, but he’s pulling his best ‘I’m just a sweet choir boy’ face right now. He’s not sure it’s working.  
  
“You want me to- to pose for a man? _Provocatively_?”  
  
Peter winces as some of the other ghosts turn towards him and Marge. It’s possible that he shouldn’t have started with the 80 year old woman who spends her time bemoaning the lack of ghost-friendly knitting needles, but it had seemed a good idea at the time. Somehow.  
  
“It’s a lot less seedy than that, Mar- Mrs. Henworth, really! It’d be like - you’ve seen Titanic, yeah?”  
  
“I have not,” Marge says dourly, and Peter tries not to grimace.  
  
“Right. Well, look, it’d just be lying on a table, propping your head up on your hand. That sort of thing, that’s all. Honestly.”  
  
Marge narrows her eyes, and Peter is suddenly reminded of a Biology teacher who’d given him that exact look when he told her that his sister had used his homework to make a fire because they were too poor to afford wood.  
  
“I’ll get you proper knitting needles,” he says desperately, “and Merino wool.”  
  
“Hmph,” Marge says, but she stops glaring at him. “Make it alpaca wool. And I’m not lying on any tables. I’ll sit in a chair.”  
  
“I can work with that,” Peter says, relieved.  
  
One frumpy old woman convinced, a dozen more to go…  
  
—  
  
Carl honestly forgets that it’s his birthday. Half of his coworkers were out with the flu, so he’d been called in on his day off to man three different phones at the call centre, with no one for company except Peter’s werewolf friend who’d somehow gotten a temp job for the day.  
  
The friend, confusingly also named Peter, keeps asking Carl how he feels about knitwear, and, at one point, chains. His teeth are very pointy, and between Carl’s vague worry about Peter the Wolf and his less-vague worry that he’ll be fired for hanging up on a potential customer, he forgets about his birthday entirely.  
  
So when he walks in the flat and accidentally falls through a complete stranger who’s sitting on their one good chair, which has been put right in front of the door, it feels like the perfect end to a terrible day.  
  
“Excuse me,” the person - an elderly woman wearing a truly massive knitted jumper  says indignantly.  
  
“I’m so sorry,” Carl says reflexively, and then -  
  
“Who are you?”  
  
“I’m Marge Henworth,” the old woman says, and she sort of floats upright in a way that Carl’s seen Peter do. “I’m part of the haunted house.”  
  
“The haunted house?”  
  
“Yes,” Marge says, managing to project an awful lot of disdain in her voice for someone whose jumper goes nearly to her knees. “The… _sexy_ haunted house.”  
  
Carl wants, rather abruptly, to die. Barring that, to sink through the floor and not have to deal with whatever mad scheme Peter’s subjected him to.  
  
“You better go on and do the rest of it,” Marge says. “Peter seemed to think you’d enjoy it.”  
  
“Did he,” Carl says flatly, but he’s already resigned himself to seeing which other ghosts Peter managed to convince to do this.  
  
The thing is, he vaguely remembers telling Peter about wanting a sexy haunted house for his birthday. He can’t remember why, exactly, except that he’d had a dream that had featured both Peter and himself engaged in certain things that Carl would, under pressure, describe as sexy, and for some reason the phrase had been in his head when he’d woken up.  
  
The fact that Peter had actually put together such a thing was sort of touching, really. Disturbing, but touching.  
  
There’s another elderly woman, who introduces herself as Angela, lounging across the kitchen table. She, unlike Marge, seems rather enthusiastic about her role, and Carl walks out of the room as quickly as possible when Angela suggests Carl “rattle her chains.”  
  
That puts him in the bathroom. For a few brief moments, Carl looks at himself in the mirror, suppressing the memory of glass and blood all over the floor of another bathroom in another time.  
  
Then he jumps a foot in the air as a ghost floats through the shower curtain.  
  
“Greetings,” the ghost says. He has extraordinarily defined cheekbones. Carl thinks he might be in love. Or about to be sick. One of the two.  
  
“Hello,” Carl replies faintly.  
  
“You must be Carl,” the ghost says, “I’m John. How are you enjoying the haunted house?”  
  
“S’fantastic,” Carl says, eying the strange, politely formal ghost.  
  
He tries to think of something else to say, but John’s sharp, blank features inspire nothing but terror and a bit of lust.  
  
“How’s...death?”  
  
John raises a single eyebrow.  
  
“It’s adequate,” he says, and Carl nods rapidly, eying the bathroom door.  
  
“I’m just going to go see, er. What else there is,” he says, and slips out the door as quickly as he’d come in.  
  
He finds two elderly ghost men on the sofa watching re-runs of the IT Crowd; they make very exaggerated swooning gestures at him, but don’t say a word. It’s bizarre, and between that, and Angela, and John’s cheekbones, he’s feeling thoroughly off-balance when he walks into the bedroom that he and Peter share.  
  
Peter is, unsurprisingly, sprawled across the bed. He sits up when Carl opens the door, smiling nervously.  
  
“Carl! How did - how was it?”  
  
“Strange,” Carl says, because he can’t think of another word that isn’t distinctly negative.  
  
“Ah, well,” Peter says, staring down at his hands, “I didn’t have much talent to work with.”  
  
“I figured,” Carl says dryly, and sits next to Peter on the bed. “John was certainly something.”  
  
Peter looks up at him and narrows his eyes.  
  
“If you like cheekbones, maybe,” he says, and rolls his eyes when Carl laughs at him.  
  
“They’re okay,” Carl says, and tries to nudge Peter’s shoulder. There’s a hint of pressure for a second, but then he goes right through Peter.  
  
“I wanted to do something,” Peter says, “because I can’t. You know. We’re a bit limited, and I thought that if this was something you wanted, that I’d try my best.”  
  
Carl smiles and settles against the wall, imagining that he can feel Peter’s shoulder touching his own.  
  
“It’s certainly the most interesting birthday present I’ve ever gotten,” he says.  
  
“Oh, I’m sure,” Peter says. “Did you meet Marge? She’s got a present for you, I think.”  
  
“A present?”  
  
“Jesus, not like that. It’s something she knitted, I think. She’s big on knitting, Marge. Anyways, we’ve got a flat full of elderly ghosts who will probably sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to you if you ask,” Peter says, moving off of the bed.  
  
“I won’t ask, but I’m sure you will,” Carl says, but he can’t help smiling at Peter as he gets up.  
  
—  
  
As it turns out, Peter does ask the ghosts to sing. Marge also does have a gift for Carl - a strangely shimmering scarf that leaps out of Carl’s hands when he tries to put it on and promptly wraps itself around his throat.  
  
In the ensuing chaos, Carl manages to hold Peter’s hand for the first time (as he feels his face steadily turning blue), until John wrenches the scarf away from Carl. Peter’s skin had felt ice-cold, but Carl’s hand burns afterwards.  
  
“I can’t say I’m surprised,” John says as Marge apologizes to Peter for Carl’s near-death. “I’ve only known you for a few minutes, but this sort of incident seems like it happens rather a lot.”  
  
“You’re not wrong,” Carl says, rubbing his neck. “Peter bought me a tea cosy last Christmas that tried to suffocate me.”  
  
“Charming,” John says, but Carl thinks he sees a hint of wistfulness in John’s expression.  
  
—  
  
After they finally clear all of the other ghosts out of the flat (barring Maurice and George, the two men who are _still_ watching the IT Crowd), Carl collapses on the bed with a sigh.  
  
“We should do this again for my birthday,” Peter says. He’s sitting on the floor petting Belvedere, who had rather sensibly vanished for the whole event.  
  
“I’m not going to ask your friends to pose on the furniture for your birthday,” Carl warns, because that seems like crossing a line somehow.  
  
“No, no,” Peter says, scratching Belvedere’s chin. “No, see, technically we live in a haunted house, since I’m a ghost, and I thought _you_ could pose on the furniture-“  
  
Carl can’t help the laughter that overtakes him at the suggestion.  
  
“We’ll see,” he says, after he catches his breath. “I’ve got an old ghost costume from Halloween somewhere around here that I could dig up.”  
  
“Can’t wait,” Peter says, floating over to the bed.  
  
“Sure,” Carl says dryly, but he makes a note to find the lipstick and sheet he’d stuffed in one of the closets. He’s pretty sure that he could top Peter’s idea of a sexy haunted house…


End file.
